Debian To Carry Patches For GNOME Dynamic Triple Buffering

Written by Michael Larabel in Debian on 3 October 2022 at 06:13 AM EDT. 27 Comments
DEBIAN
There's been a lot happening in Debian recently from improving their handling of non-free firmware to switching to PipeWire and WirePlumber with Debian 12. Another change on the way is picking up Ubuntu's work on dynamic triple buffering for the GNOME desktop.

Due to upstream GNOME/Mutter not viewing the work as ready yet, Ubuntu has been carrying their own dynamic triple buffering support with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and the upcoming 22.10. This GNOME triple buffering support has been working out well for improving the desktop performance especially with cases of Intel integrated graphics, Raspberry Pi performance, and other situations where when moving dynamically to triple buffering it ramps up the GPU work and thus in a higher performance state.

A Phoronix reader pointed out that the Ubuntu patches for the dynamic triple buffering are working their way to Debian. Canonical engineer Jeremy Bicha recently patched the Debian experimental Mutter 43 build with the dynamic triple buffering support and the changes as of today have reached Debian testing and in turn to be found in Debian 12, short of any issues coming up where they would decide to drop these out-of-tree patches. As of this morning, Mutter 43.0-2 reached Debian Testing with the dynamic double/triple buffering in tow.


The upstream MR tracking the dynamic triple buffering for GNOME does continue to see revised patches by Canonical's Daniel van Vugt. But the latest upstream comment on the work remains:
Unsetting the milestone as unfortunately there's no timeline to merge this in it's current form. We of course know that for many users this MR improves the experience a lot, however until a solution deemed ready for upstream arrives, users or distros wanting to have it will need to carry it as downstream patch.

P.S.: some good things need time ;)

In any event, until a proper upstream solution is ready, some Linux distributions are happy to carry the work themselves as it can mean a noticeable improvement to the user experience.

Look for the Debian 12 release with many goodies in 2023.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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